The 2005 winner of the Man Booker prize – a yearly award given to the best novel published by an author native to any territory of the former British Empire -“The Sea” by John Banville is exactly the kind of novel that seems to win the award. Banville’s prose is elegant, erudite, subdued and focuses on the power and frailty of memory in the void left by death.
The Sea is about an older man, Max, who, following the slow death of his wife, returns to the seaside village where he vacationed as a child. Max chooses The Cedars for his stay; the stately summer home once habited by the Graces, an upper crust family who had awed Max as a boy. Soon he begins to relive the summer when he falls in love with Mrs. Grace and then, suddenly, switches his affections to her daughter, Chloe.
Max’s narration is cloaked in a fog of grief. Early in the novel, it becomes clear that Max is not the most reliable narrator: his perception is tainted by his fancies. Max’s grief renders him thankfully unpretentious – a relief in a character who so openly reveals himself as a dilettante, social-climbing fake. The death of his wife Anna, someone he imagines was his infuriating fellow pretender, re-opens the void he had as a child, and rekindles his sense of himself as “a distinct nobody,” a helpless bystander in her death.
He comes to understand his relationship with the Graces as his first young attempt to rise above his embarrassingly lower middle class background and construct a fantasy of himself as a person of “worth,” which in his child’s mind, money and privilege were. He wished to be “an indistinct somebody” in their mold. Yet the Graces are described as languid, sometimes gross and almost ghostly in their near Olympian divinity. They inhabited a world which young max coveted; a lost world of money and glamour nested between two world wars and fading by Max’s time. The Graces and the sea itself, given how Chloe and her brother vanished in Max’s memory, are tied to his sense of death. Death in the novel is omnipresent, outside of time and memory and essentially as indistinct as Max strove to be.
By the end of the novel, Max has been consumed by his memories. He is dragged back to reality by his adult daughter and the fiancé he insists is no good – showing just how clouded his judgment is, or has become. As a child and adult, Max is prone to transposing his own fantasies onto the world. To maintain the illusion, he often ignores subtle meaning of body language. In this way he misunderstands his daughter’s involvement with her fiancé and fails to notice that Mrs. Grace, his oedipal love, and Rose, the 20 year-old housekeeper, were lesbians.
As a story of memory, the past and the present are woven together seamlessly, taking the reader sailing through Max’s reeling mind, a metaphorical sea of death. There are times in the novel where these transitions are jarring and sudden, but nowhere more than on the first page, where the novel opens with a short ethereal paragraph, describing the day that Chloe and her brother disappeared, before jumping into the present and a more substantial description of The Cedars. The intention here was probably to create the all important sense of Max’s foggy mind, but it simply doesn’t work. Regardless of the genre, a reader needs something concrete in the first few pages to anchor them in the world of the story. The second paragraph, describing The Cedars, would have been perfect. The current opening is doing the novel no favors.
One leaves the book with more questions than answers, appropriate since returning to the sea did about the samething for Max. Answers are left to be gleaned from the holes in his recollections and from between the lines of half-overheard conversations that he was all too quick to misinterpret.